How to Make a Documentary, and How Not

Il Teatro Buce has screened a couple of documentaries lately and they are an instructive lesson in what is good--and what not-- in the form.

The first was Up the Yangtze, which gets a 96 percent Rotten Tomatoes rating (link)--a number which surely tells you more about the reviewers than it does about the film. It has some lovely soulful shots of the river landscape, but they're just raisins in an otherwise tasteless porridge of liberal pieties. One thing it's not is a documentary: almost every speech is so neat, so efficient, so encapsulated that every breath cries out "scripted!" And scripted though it may be, the director still can't seem to crowbar it into a consistent formula. He's pretty clearly trying to tell us something about the evils of development and the exploitation of the peasants. He does, indeed, seem to have hoiked up one real peasant family who do, indeed, appear to lead a life of almost imaginable privation (or did before they became a movie number, which surely changed their life forever). It's easy to sympathize with their daughter, who would rather go to college than go to work on the riverboat. The problem is that for her (as the movie so clearly shows) going to work on the river seems to be pretty much of a ticket out: no doubt she is unhappy, but she is unhappy the way any 15-year-old would be unhappy if she had to spend her days washing dishes and cleaning up crap. And at the end, weren't we told (or did I read it someplace else?) that she actually got to go back to school--probably more disciplined and sophisticated than she would have been hand she never left home.

Lost in La Mancha is a different matter. It's the account of Terry Gilliam's failed attempt to make a movie out of Don Quixote. I suppose that ever since Sophie Coppola, people have been making back-story videos of life on the film set. And I grant that movie people by nature know how to play for a camera, so they are acting all the time even when they aren't acting. But what we don't know--in truth, I did not know--until it happens is that this movie is a flop, a failure, a fiasco--32 million dollars down the tube, and Gilliam, who must hold some sort of world record for expensive flops, goes back to the drawing board once again. Indeed, we see it all unfold before us, in excruciating detail. We are reminded that this is the man who brought us Baron Munchausen and Brazil. We're told how hard it was to raise this kind of dough from the Europeans. We're get hints that Jean Rochefort (who would have made a glorious Quixote) might be a little iffy. And then we are there, and the cameras are running, as the clouds form, and the rains arrive, and from then on it all goes gurgling hideously down the drain.

I can just hear somebody telling Gilliam--well, it's not all lost: at least we got a wonderful documentary. Gilliam must have the hide of a rhino to keep doing this again and again. I hear he is gearing up for a new fo at his Quixote story. I'm a fan; I'll watch. But it will be hard to improve on this passionate, zany, heart-breaking account of how it all went wrong. Oh, and I see that its Rotten Tomtoes number is 94 percent, so they're not always wrong.